


Her Name Is True

by mortalitasi



Series: bones and violets [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Friendship, General, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:10:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2767619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trevelyan is young, but what lives inside her is very old - and often very wise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Name Is True

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goatrocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goatrocket/gifts).



> chances are if you have something to complain about i don't want to hear it. enjoy. Grace isn't my Inquisitor, i'm just borrowing her~

 

YOU’RE REAL ENOUGH FOR ME.

 

…

 

 

Unlike the Inquisition, the Inquisitor _is_ a person.

Maybe she’s the one that makes the Inquisition _the Inquisition_ , makes it what all others here talk about as though it’s a living, breathing thing. He’s starting to think that’s it. Cole is not used to being unable to receive nothing more than a passing impression from anyone, but the Inquisitor—the glare of the Mark drowns almost everything else about her out. He can see—feel—some vague forms that should be helping him figure her out past the blinding beacon that is the Anchor, and… it’s not doing anything. It’s not helping. If that doesn’t help him, _he_ doesn’t know how to help _her_.

What he does get isn’t full, isn’t forceful. Just pieces, gathered here and there, like putting together a broken mirror, trying to find your eye in the reflection staring back at you from the shattered shards—you know your eyes are there, looking out, but you can’t see them, and if you can’t see them, it makes them just a little bit less real. The Inquisitor is like a mirror, as well, showing and showing but not herself—she gives everyone images of _them_ , teaches them more about their own nature, and while they’re locked in learning, she lingers, light and lonely.

She reminds him of the braziers the priests in red and white keep lit long into the night and over into the next dawn, never flickering, never faltering, never fading, always forward, always flame and faraway and fond. He wonders whether the strength in her heart ever finds rest—ever admits to quiet folly, to laughing the way Varric does, easy and effortless. She does do that, sometimes. Laughing, that is. It’s the same as watching bubbles froth at the top of the pints Bull likes to drain in one draught. Quick, cast in circles, bright, brisk, not fractured—but free.

He has a habit of wandering the battlements. People worry about him sitting on the edge, but they forget eventually and he’s left to do what he wishes, and today that is exactly what is happening. Cole swings his legs, feeling the great space of the emptiness below him. It’s a long way down. He won’t fall. The rim of his hat keeps the worst of the daylight out. Here atop the mountain the air is thin and the sun is fierce and unapologetic, burning through skin and fabric.

In the middle of the infirmary in the courtyard stands the Inquisitor, a figure of lavender and white amidst the darkness of the soldiers and the injured, the surgeons and the supplicants, the sour and stopping.

She kneels at the bedside of a corporal—Townsend—he’s not dying, but he is hurting, and she knows. She can’t see like Cole does, and she does her best anyway. He has a name for her in his head, though he doesn’t know what it is. That happens with everyone, even if a lot of people don’t stop to think about it. When you get to know someone, you begin to refer to them with an image, or a feeling, in your head—maybe it has a word, maybe it doesn’t. Regardless, it’s there, and it stays, could change after you learn more about them. It’s never certain.

He may not be able to move past the Mark, but he _can_ hear what she’s saying, if he listens close enough.

“I’m not very proficient at healing, I’m afraid, though I can get you whatever you need so long as you ask,” she tells the man with the pain in his chest. “I’d inquire after your health, but, well…”

“Your Worship? I—I don’t know what to say. Why… why are you here?”

Smile, she’s smiling. It’s slight and sure. “Because I heard about how you got hurt. I hope you realize you’re quite brave.”

“Oh, I—uh—well… thank you, Your Worship.”

“You’re welcome. Now, about what you needed, is there anything?”

“N-no. Not particularly.”

“Are you sure?”

“…Perhaps, some—the flask there?”

The smile, again. “Of course.”

Cole looks on as Grace pulls a gourd from a rucksack strung on the cot nearest to her, holds the man’s head up with a helpful hand, and lets him drink. The thirst drains from him, rain seeping into dry, cracked ground, washed away by the will of the water. It’s relief like that—the cool respite of getting what you need—that makes what Cole is, whatever he is, worth it. It is good. And he likes good.

Yes, he thinks, and Grace corks the gourd, smiles, third time. Good… is good.

 

…

 

Grace fights with the elegance her name would imply. With greater knowledge about how things beyond her legs and arms move.

She’s one step ahead almost all the time, keeping pace with Varric, keeping pace with him. She spins under and out of sweeping strikes, dodges and dives, and once slides right around a hulking Venatori brute on a burgeoning path of ice that springs out from beneath the soles of her boots. It crackles and shines, shimmering, perfect in form and flight. It’s almost a dance. He sends out a chain and it latches in the chinks of the armor of the man too tall to be anything but a tower and he _pulls_. Dirt flies around him as the momentum lifts him from the ground.

He hits the brute feet-first, leans in, and digs a dagger deep into the depression between the man’s shoulders. Twisting tight. Take it. The injurer yowls in pain. They never like it when he returns the hurt. Screaming, slaves, no salvation, no _safety_. Something sinister is always stirring in Venatori minds—dark and dead. He doesn’t like them. They like him even less. He doesn’t care much.

Cole rips the dagger loose as the brute reaches a hand to grab for him, escaping, and spins off to the side. The dune beneath them is crumbling with the brute’s weight, so Cole slips past, silent as a shadow, only stopping to cut the dagger across the taut tendon at the back of his enemy’s heel. Another screech as the blade bites through the leather of the shoe and finds the flesh beneath. The giant’s hobbled. He crumples, practically pitiful, like a stack of cards folding in on themselves, large hands leaving strange prints on the sand, shapes that make no sense unless you’ve seen the armor the brute is wearing.

Then the Inquisitor is near, staff turned upward. It’s gleaming with cold light. Grace likes her ice and lightning. Storm and snow. She regards the Venatori stooped on the ground with the consideration that is characteristic of her, before she clenches a fist and the spirit blade coalesces in her grip. It’s blue and bright, singing like the Fade, raw and pure. It does quick work when she needs it to, like his daggers. Ice creeps through the sand, sealing the Venatori’s legs in a glossy prison, the blood around his heel transforming into crystallized streams of ruby. The man struggles, vainly, and the Inquisitor’s spectral sword cuts his throat open with a hiss—like the mages in the White Spire.

The Venatori dies there, face-down, in the middle of a desolate desert in the Wastes, and then they hear a cough. Varric is still standing behind them, Cassandra too.

“Do you two need a moment?”

Grace blinks at him. In the gloom, her eyes are wolfish. Gold.

“We’re fine, thanks,” she says. The spirit blade dissolves in smoke and sparks.

Varric raises a brow. “Holy shit, though… you get results, don’t you?”

She shrugs, laughs a little. “I try.”

 

…

 

The mages Dorian has met number in the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, and the Inquisitor is the first of her kind—or perhaps the last.

That happens often with special people. A shame, really, but if there were more of them, they really wouldn’t be _special_ , now would they? She’s ingenious with her magic, intuitive in ways that come from being alone with your abilities without a mentor to help or offer guidance. She’d mentioned once that she hadn’t always been a Circle mage, and that she didn’t truly consider herself as such, so he supposes he has the answer to his question.

She’s fond of using a modification of the Fade-step spell, but she hadn’t identified it as that until he pointed it out to her. He’d asked her who’d taught it to her, and she’d just shrugged and gone, “Me?”

There aren’t many things that can stump one of the gifted mages of the noble houses of Tevinter—Grace is one of them. Somehow. She doesn’t seem like anything other than a soft-spoken young woman when you first meet her. Of course, his first impression may have been, ah… colored by the circumstances which they were in. He was a bit tired—that typically happens when you run halfway across the country, over one of the most unforgiving mountain ranges in the region, all to get to the arse-end of nowhere in order to warn people you know nothing about of an incoming _cultist incursion_. He reflects on that for a moment. Well, when you put that way, it sounds almost heroic. He won’t complain.

A rage demon bursts from the rift above them, and when it lands, it sets the surrounding grass and underbrush on fire.

“Marvelous,” he mutters, widening his stance. He’s going to need something cold to fend _this_ one off. Ice isn’t quite his area of expertise—that runs more along the lines of lightning. And corpses. Very attractive, he knows. He clears his throat. “A little help for the mage?”

It’s not a second later that a blue-white blur rushes in his direction, ghosting through the demon rearing overhead, and then right through _him_ , too. Dorian has never been quite the poet—though there have been attempts—so he can’t describe the feeling of another mage flying into and passing out of the very thing that makes you what you are. For the few instants that the Fade-step spell is alive, it means you are a wraith, moving between the fabric of reality and the Veil. Having _that_ pressed upon you is like… is like when you shut your eyes and seeing the picture you were staring at a moment earlier floating there in the blackness.

Bah. See? Not a poet.

The rage demon is more or less frozen now, rooted to the ground and—well, very angry. Appropriate. And also making equally angry noises.

Grace has materialized behind him, hair wild, grinning. “Hi.”

“Don’t ‘hi’ me,” Dorian says, shaking his staff at her. “I hate it when you _do_ that. Must you swoop over me every time you charge in?”

She looks at the demon. “Well, it worked, didn't it?”

“And it may work on _me_ , one day.”

“I would never freeze you!”

“You say that now, but when I'm a Tevinter ice sculpture, you'll be singing a different tune.”

Grace's expression creases into something apologetic. “Well, if I did, I'd feel very, very sorry.”

“A comfort like none other.”

Across the wooded clearing, Cassandra kicks a Terror flat , yelling in frustration. “Perhaps we could save the witticisms for _later_?”

“Sure!” Grace says, straightening like she's swallowed a ramrod. “Getting to it!”

“Behind you, Inquisitor,” Dorian reminds her.

It's funny when she whips around, the bun of her bound hair bouncing, ready to snap back into being the immutable leader that most believe her to be. He remembers meeting her, bursting through the gates of Haven, and thinking, _this can't be her._ The Inquisitor, this tiny slip of a girl? Impossible. And then he'd seen her blast a hole through a Venatori spellbinder with nothing to help her but the concentrated narrow of her eyes. She _is_ young, yes, but that seems to have no bearing on the fact that she can be utterly terrifying.

“Where's Cole?” she asks, and just as she says that, something strikes the rage demon with enough force to shatter the ice and leave it lying prone on the ground. Cole blinks at them from the cover of his hat and flips the daggers he's holding point-downwards. “Oh.”

“There you have it,” Dorian says. “Now—shall we?”

“Yes.”

He shocks the stirring demon with a decisively-placed bolt of lightning, and is gloating about how wonderfully that went when he has to duck a wayward spray of icicles.

“ _Treveylan_!”

“You ducked, didn't you?”

“And what if I hadn't?!”

She giggles and turns away, coattails flaring. At least he's not a statue.

Yet.

 

…

 

What he first notices about Skyhold is its immensity.

“Well done, Rhys,” is what Evangeline would say if she weren't occupied with overseeing the transportation of their valuables—what little they have left, anyway.

He drifts by and through all sorts of people—peddlers, surgeons, herbalists, mages, templars, elves and human and dwarf alike, all under the same banner, all working toward the same cause. He's spent so long in the fractured communities of the Circles that he forgot what true unity felt like. He supposes there's no going back to that. Maybe that's a good thing. No one recognizes him, which is refreshing, and he uses the next half hour or so wandering about, peeking into the stables (and stopping at the sight of an _undead horse with a sword shoved through its skull_ ), and generally making a nuisance of himself.

The tavern—or what passes as a tavern here, anyway—is welcoming. It smells like spiced cider and mutton and a faint whiff of woodsmoke. There's a pretty bard by the fire, singing verse by verse of memorized lays and poems, plucking at the strings of her lute (he thinks it's a lute, anyhow), and a very solemn-faced dwarf tending the bar. Rhys lets the door shut behind him, grateful for the wash of warmth that rolls over him. The mountains are unforgivably cold. His feet have probably forgotten the rest of him exists. _He_ feels like he's forgotten the rest of him. Brr.

The company in the tavern is no less diverse. He spots a qunari—mercenary?—as he takes the stairs upward. There are less people here, and the crowd is noticeably less... rowdy. He tilts his head to the side, intending to see just how far the attic is from the level he's standing on. Not _very_ far. The topmost floor is the quietest (not surprising), but he has to be careful not to slam the back of his skull on the sloped ceiling. Such are the curses of being tall.

There's a door here. He wonders where it leads. Rhys stretches out a hand, preparing to twist the knob, but—he stops. He doesn't know why. All he knows is that he _should_. His fingers slip from the metal, he turns, and...

“Rhys,” Cole says, his voice barely a thread of sound amidst the clamoring tapestry of music and merriment from the lower floor.

He—doesn't look the same. Taller, perhaps? No, stronger? That's not it. More... _real_? The Cole of the White Spire had an intangibility about him, a sensation of slipping away, like an anchor that's lost its mooring. The Cole of the White Spire was sad, and alone, and a wisp of what he could truly be. This—isn't the same Cole. He's fuller. Steadier. Solid. Trying to explain that to another person would make Rhys sound like a madman. But it makes sense, for him, and for what he knew Cole to be.

“You look good,” Rhys tells him. If this is a dream, it's a terribly realistic one. “But... you still need a comb.”

Cole stares at him—with eyes so clear and so very human. “I'm sorry,” he blurts, unable to stop the words.

“No,” Rhys says, shaking his head. “ _I'm_ sorry.”

“The Lord Seeker—”

“—can go hang in the Fade,” Rhys finishes for him. One step, two, three, four, and Rhys has diminished the distance to the point where it's possible for him to lay his hands on Cole's shoulders. He does that, all the while asking himself how he could have ever forgotten even the slightest bit about Cole. “I should have looked for you.”

“I didn't want to be found,” Cole says, lips only just moving. “I was too frightened, frustrated. Finished.”

“I heard you'd joined the Inquisition—I could scarcely believe it. I could have come sooner. I have no idea what I was afraid of. But here I am. Fashionably late. As always.”

“Here, I can help. Sometimes hastily, but mostly... healing. She's let me do it. I'm more like I want to be.”

“'She?' The Inquisitor?”

Cole nods, and for the first time, Rhys is witness to him smiling, though it fades swiftly.

“You... don't hate me?”

Rhys' heart sinks in his chest. “Is that what you've thought, all this time? Cole—I never have. I failed you. It won't happen again.”

“I—”

That's not acceptable. He's hugged Cole once before, and that was a desperate, horrible action, an urgent attempt at staying grounded, and he'd held Cole as the young man cried himself into hollowness, deep wrenching sobs that had filled the Fade around them with more reality than anything that place had ever known.

It was probably then that Rhys knew, that no matter what Cole was—or what he thought he was—whatever the base to him could or would be, it was honest. It was _true_. The emotion, the intent, the pain, and the sorrow, they were every one of them earnest. Rhys has watched and felt his share of loss. There is no counterfeiting that, and no demon he's ever met has been able to match it. Not really. He should have known better, but he let doubt cripple him, and it cost him the only friend he'd made in a long time. There's going to be no repeat of that. Not if Rhys can help it.

Cole's hands curl into the fabric of Rhys' cloak, and he presses his forehead to the front of Rhys' tunic.

“You didn't forget.”

“Not much,” Rhys says, laughing. “I didn't want to. I'm stubborn like that. Evangeline hasn't, too.”

Cole steps back abruptly. “She's here?”

“I _hope_ she's gotten past the bridge,” Rhys remarks. “The last time I saw her she was yelling at a merchant whose wagons were blocking up the causeway. Poor sod.”

Rhys is about to elaborate when they both hear the padding of measured steps coming up the stairs.

“Cole? Are you here, I want to—oh. Hello.”

It's a girl. A small one. The highest curve of her brow must only come up to the beginning of Rhys' shoulders. She's dressed in a purplish coat of enchanter's armor with the insignia of the Inquisition emblazoned across the spread of her pauldrons, and she's watching him with a pair of heavy-lidded eyes the color of summertime Antivan brandy. Perhaps the strangest feature out of everything is her bone-white hair. Its curls are just one twirl away from being a bushel of corkscrews, and it... works? She's pretty, and grows prettier as Rhys focuses on her. Her face breaks into a smile. Oh, dimples.

“Are you—Cole's Rhys?”

That shocks a laugh out of Rhys. “I don't know, am I? Probably. The Inquisitor, I presume?”

She laughs, too, and it's bubbly and _adorable_. Good Maker. “That's me, yes. Somehow.”

“Well-met,” Rhys says, offering her a hand. Her shake is surprisingly firm.

The Inquisitor smiles. “Likewise.”

“I didn't catch your name.”

She starts, taken off-guard. “Right. Forgot. I'm Grace. Trevelyan. But just call me Grace.”

“Well,” Rhys starts in a drawl. “I can see why Cole joined the Inquisition.”

The Inquisitor makes strangled noise, like when when you swallow the wrong way and air goes places it shouldn't. “You—what? I—”

He chuckles. “Nothing, Inquisitor. Just some passing silliness of mine. Shall we go somewhere more comfortable to talk?”

“Talk?” she says at the same time Cole says, “Here is fine.”

“Yes,” Rhys confirms, stroking at his beard thoughtfully.

“What about?” the Inquisitor asks.

Rhys waggles his brows at her. “Stuff. _Things_.”

 

…

 

They'd seen it.

All of it. Bits? It doesn't really matter, whichever it is. They know now, each and every one of them. She'd thought maybe—maybe now she could create some distance, especially now, maybe there were enough people around her to help with the birth of a new start, to escape from the weight of the name bearing down upon her. The mantle of the Trevelyans has always been a heavy one. It's a burden she once believed would crush her. It had come close, and then she'd snapped, and—

Her room in Griffon Wing Keep is the biggest it's got to offer. Spacious, but sparse, and it smells of sand and stone. There's nothing personal in here, and she's glad for it. She's been sitting on this bed for the last three hours, sheets crumpled around her, the thin fabric of her nightshirt sticking to her skin. It'd been deep night when they'd trudged back from Adamant to the Keep—no one wanted to spend another minute in the fortress, and she didn't fault them, but the journey to the Keep was torture. She couldn't meet Cassandra's eyes. How could she?

Just thinking about it makes the tears well up in her eyes again. One would suppose that after almost an entire evening of weeping, a body would simply run out of fresh tears to cry. It seems that isn't so. Grace buries her face in her arms, praying that she could for just a few moments focus on the smell of her lavender soap instead of the pool of cold fear at the bottom of her stomach.

_They must loathe me._

“Have you told your friends about the parties you used to hold before getting to the Circle, Inquisitor?” the demon had said, its voice silk and secrets and _poison_. “Or the tragic circumstances surrounding your orphaning?”

Cassandra had put a hand on her shoulder. That had been before the memories. “Don't listen to it. Demons will twist anything for their benefit. It's a liar.”

Then a laugh had echoed in the spaces around them, rippling the ponds of emerald water and setting the veins of viridian rock around them trembling. “Why lie, when the truth is so much more terrifying?”

The next time it'd spoken, they'd been halfway through those caves, the ones full of jade stalactites and chairs on ceilings and candles growing out of the walls—a bizarre world, upside-down, where sideways was straight and to go left was to veer right. The Fade doesn't make much sense in dreams, and physically, it had been nothing short of a nightmare. Fitting, then.

The demon's speech had been a whisper, sibilant and subdued, but strident. It made no sense. “Sometimes you lie awake at night, remembering the roaring of the fire. Did it please you, to hear your mother scream? Was it satisfying to watch the flesh peel from her cheeks, to see her pound at the glass? Did you like knowing the window was locked, and that Terrence had left the key, again, underneath the wrong vase on the mantelpiece? She couldn't get out. And you _didn't mind._ ”

She hadn't, and she despises herself for it. Looking back, she can't make out what it was that broke the barrier between rationality and survival. Father had reached for something, and Mother hadn't helped, like all the times before it, and then Father was unconscious, and Mother was screaming, angry, always so angry. Grace knows some things—she had run, down the hall, slipping on the marble, Mother chasing her, and the door had been just ahead when Mother had caught her by the collar of her tunic. She'd shrieked, struck out with her fists. _Stay away!_ Mother, carried by force of magic, slammed against the statue of Caspar Pentaghast sitting at the foot of the foyer's staircase.

 _I need to get away_ , she'd thought, and at that instant, the oddest idea had moved into her mind. _It's wood. The floor is marble but the rest is wood. It'll burn. Everything will burn. They will burn._

It had. She'd slammed the door shut behind her, slammed it shut on every year of being locked in her room, every year of listening to the Satinalia revelry go on below, every year of watching the festivities from above, looking at the light and love on people's faces and wondering what it'd be like if Mother and Father didn't blame her; on every year of roaming the house alone, friendless, every stretch of time Mother banished her to her chambers for being upset and making the pots float, every day that Adaline had to sneak her pastries from the kitchen in an apron pocket because Mother had forgotten to have her served dinner during the confinement. Every day, of every week, of every month, of every year—closed. Shut. _Goodbye_.

She'd set the draperies and rafters aflame with an effortlessness that surprised her. She wasn't, and still isn't, one for fire spells of any kind. But she'd been angry, and anger is _hot._

The blaze had been feverishly warm on her back as she'd scrambled up the hill the mansion had been built adjacent to. She'd had no shoes, no gloves, no finery, no leathers—just a scared girl in a slip of satin, embroidered with purple. _T_ _for Trevelyan. A shame you cannot live up to the legacy._

Adaline had found her stumbling through the underbrush the following morning, had wiped the soot from her cheeks and temple, grey eyes worried, hands caring, unafraid, like before. Adaline never had been afraid. Not of Grace. She'd been a servant, and an elf, below each estimation the Trevelyans had ever set for themselves, and she'd been the only one who had seen—who had understood.

“They're gone,” Grace had stuttered, grasping at Adaline's wrists.

“But you're not. I love you, little bird, and I thank Andraste that you are alright.”

Grace had cried after that, for a while, and Adaline had pressed a kiss to her forehead and kept her near, the way it would get when younger Grace couldn't sleep and she needed her Adaline to hold her hand until she drifted off to find better things in dreams far, far away.

The demon had shown them. Even Cole.

_I'm a monster._

She scrubs at her face with her sleeves, leaving red tracks on her cheeks with the force of it. She turns to blow out the candle burning on her nightstand and—her stomach gurgles. That's right, she hasn't eaten in... however long it's been since they came back. She'll be sick tomorrow if she doesn't have something now. It's late, so no one should be up and around on this level. She hopes she's right.

Grace slings her feet over the side of the bed and hops down. It's not really _that_ big of a distance, but her height makes the loftier of beds a little bit of an adventure to get on and off from. She sniffs as she pads her way over to the door, realizing with distaste that her nose is thoroughly blocked. Too much weeping.

The hinges squeak very quietly—and she curses them—when she opens the door, and she's about to step over the threshold when she feels a cool and feathery touch on the sole of her foot. She looks down, perplexed. It's... a slim bushel of crystal grace, fresh, vibrant, the stalks of its scarlet stamens totally intact. The stems are tied together primly with a sloppily-knotted purple ribbon.

For the first time this week, Grace smiles.

 

…

 

He's already on the balcony when Grace comes outside to speak to the woman in the wine-colored gown.

That one is dark at the edges, brighter at the center, like a sun with a black crown. She's inscrutable and not indecisive and intrinsically _dangerous_. She knows it, as well. She catches his eye as she passes—they're not like Grace's. These are sharp. So sharp. Embers in her skull, yellow and fierce and formed, because she recognizes what she wants and she will take it. Cole is not sure whether to be wary or welcoming. Perhaps both. The woman walks away, shoes clicking, head held high. He waits until he cannot see her any longer to step out and go to Grace.

She seems taller in tonight's clothing but it's an illusion—well-played, by Vivienne, who knows how to make small things look big and big things to look tiny. Vivienne is wonder, even if she is worried. He wishes he could make her believe he doesn't want to hurt anyone. He would never hurt, not ever willingly. It's why he listened and listens to Varric. It's why he's becoming the Cole that Cole would have liked to be, the Cole that wanted apples in the spring and afternoons on the porch and no cupboards, only peace and plenty. Solas is wise, and he is a Fade-friend, but Varric knows how stones sit and people play. Cole can _learn_ from him.

Grace doesn't startle at him coming to stand across her.

“You're tired,” he observes, and she laughs, leaning her elbows on the balcony's railing. She is sparkling, diamonds drawn into the droop of her dress, twinkling and twittering, the wink of the light on them fast and furious like birdsong. The dress is blue. His favorite color.  _Fa-a-avorite._ A strange word to taste.

“You could say that,” Grace replies, looking out over the courtyard of the Winter Palace. The breeze stirs her hair. “Just like home, only with... more fountains.”

Cole would know what to say, or what to think to say, if this were anyone else. But he cannot know because this is Grace, and Grace is too loud—or the Anchor makes her too loud—and he can't hear beyond it. Is this is what Varric means when he says “playing it by ear?”

 _Cling, cling_. Music. The strike of string on string. Maybe...

“Would dancing help?” he inquires. This time she _does_ startle.

“I—does it matter if it would? You don't have to. I'll be alright.”

“I _want_ to help,” he says, and then gingerly outstretches a hand, palm upward. “I watched. No one but the lady with the face inside a face asked you. The others, they all knew the steps so well. I've seen... I've searched for it. I can.”

She stares at him. The heartbeats before she puts her hand in his are many. She's smaller up close, and the crest of her highest curl brushes against his nose. He has to restrain a sneeze.

“You know the steps too,” he says after a while.

“Lessons,” she tells him, resting her wrist on the crook of his arm. “In another life. It seems so long ago now.”

Their next turn takes them by the vase of roses in the corner of the balcony.

“Thank you,” Cole says, and she looks up at him questioningly. “For letting me stay.”

She shakes her head. “Thank _you_ for coming along.”

He smiles at her, a bit, and decides it was good to choose against the amulet, to fend away the fear and to find a different path.

Grace shouldn't forget this—and he shouldn't, either.

 


End file.
